Mamta Kalia

(Daniel Bell), or ‘post-modern time’ (C.
Wright Mills) or age of ‘mass culture’
(B.R. Burg). Further there have been
declarations about several types of ends
by social scientists and litterateurs. For
instance, William Hamilton talked of ‘
the radical theory and the death of God’,
(1996), Daniel Bell talked of ‘end of
ideology’, J Derrida talked of ‘end of
man, (1982), F. Fukuyama talked of ‘end
of history and the last man’, (1991) Victor
Vergin talked of ‘end of art’, (1986),
S. Karnan talked of ‘death of literature’
(1990), Rolland Barthes talked of ‘ death
of author’ and Michel Foucault talked
of ‘death of critic’. These declarations
on deaths have some manifest or latent
connections with the post-modernism,
or better to say post-modernity.
In 1960’s, during the period of
‘counter-culture’, post-modernism was
seen as ‘an attitude of counter-culture’
or a new elective and radically
domesticated sensibility of rejecting the
exclusivist and repressive character of
liberal humanism and its institution. In
1970’s, post-modernism entered into the
structuralism, taking inspiration from
Rolland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuge
and Felix Guattari. To quote Hans Bertens,
“Like post-structuralism, this postmodernism
rejects the empirical idea
that language can represent reality, that
the world is accessible to us through
language because its objects are mirrored
in the language we use. From this
empirical point of view, language is
transparent, window on the world, and
knowledge arises out of our direct
experience of reality undistorted and
not contaminated by language. Postmodernism
gives up on language’s
representational function and follows
post-structuralism in the idea that
language constitutes, rather than reflects
the world and that knowledge is,
therefore, always distorted by language
that is by the historical circumstances
and the specific environment in which
it arises.” Thus a post-modern subject
is largely other-directed, that is
determined within and constituted by
language.
Subsequently, in late 1970’s and early
1980’s, the post-structuralist modernism
of Barthes and Derrida became linguistic,
i.e., textual in orientation. Their attack
on foundational notions of language,
representation and the subject is
combined with a strong emphasis on
‘ free play’ (Derrida) and ‘inter-textuality’.
According to R Barthes (‘Image-Music-
Text’, 1977), a text, with the ‘death of
author’ is a ‘multidimensional space in
which a variety of writings, none of them
original, blend and clash’. Further a text
is ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from
the innumerable centers of culture’. They
talked of the ‘end of representation’failure
of language to represent anything
outside itself- and death of the subject.
But it gives birth to a problem. To Brenda
K Marshall (‘Teaching the Post-modern:
Fiction and Theory’, 1992), since all the
representations are political in that they
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